Tag: Iapetus

Landslides can wreak enormous destruction, especially when they travel farther than expected. When an avalanche occurs, dirt both falls vertically and spreads horizontally, with the horizontal distance usually no more than twice the vertical drop. But in a sturzstrom, some unknown factor decreases the coefficient of friction, allowing the earth to slide much farther; it acts more like a glacier or a lava flow than a regular avalanche. Theories about that friction-reducing factor abound—trapped air, water, or mud, pressure, rubbed and heated rock becoming more slippery, rock nanoparticles, sound waves, changes in local gravity—but its true nature is still unknown. By examining sturzstroms that occur on distant planets and moons—whose forces of gravity, atmospheres, fluids, and soil differ from those on Earth—researchers hope to unravel the factors that contribute to a landslide’s length. This information could help us predict landslides’ shapes and alleviate the damage they cause.

Saturn and its moons may owe their distinctive looks to a legacy of destruction.

First, the magnificent rings of the sixth planet: Although astronomers have gazed at the rings for centuries, experts are still debating exactly how these loops formed. Now a new study in the journal Nature proposes that the rings are the leftovers of a large moon that was torn asunder when Saturn’s gravity reeled it in four and a half billion years ago. Lead researcher Robin Canup says this theory explains both how the rings got there, and why they’re made of nearly solid ice.

In the new study, Canup calculated that a moon the size of Titan — Saturn’s largest at some 5,000 kilometers across — would begin to separate into layers as it migrated inward. Saturn’s tidal pull would cause much of the moon’s ice to melt and then refreeze as an outer mantle. As the moon spiraled into the planet, Canup’s calculations show, the icy layer would be stripped off to form the rings. [Science News]

That layered removal is the key to Canup’s explanation, which we covered briefly when she first presented the idea at a meeting in October. Other explanations for the rings’ formation include a comet crashing into a moon, or Saturn pulling in a moon and causing it to shatter all at once. Those events would create a cascade of small objects that Saturn’s gravity could have coalesced into rings, but it would seem that they would have created much rockier rings. In reality, Saturn’s are 95 percent ice.